On a damp night in February 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, five Catholic Worker activists scrambled across runways and broke into a hangar at Shannon Airport. Swinging hammers and a pickaxe, they did more than $2.5 million damage to a US Navy transport plane. The five were hit with the full weight of the law and were quickly condemned by the media and much of the antiwar movement. But, three-and-a-half years later, a Dublin jury decided they were innocent of any crime.

Harry Browne is a journalism lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology.